When Donald Trump stares into a mirror he sees a young Elvis.
The doofus-in-chief sparked belly laughs earlier this year after making that comparison. But we also know he thinks he has the physique of Rocky Balboa. His peepers are “beautiful blue eyes.” His hair, or whatever the mad scientists glued to his scalp that morning, is “beyond perfect.”
So it’s no surprise when Trump throws a temper tantrum after confronted with a photo or painting or napkin doodle that doesn’t conform to his delusional vanity.
On Sunday, Trump jumped on his Truth Social soapbox to whine about a portrait hanging in a presidential gallery in the Colorado State Capitol. He claimed the oil painting, by Sarah Boardman, was “purposefully distorted” and “truly the worst.”
It has now been taken down and will possibly be replaced with a painting of James Dean.
I don’t get why he is so upset. Nobody would glance at that painting and ask, “Is that Martha Stewart?” It’s clearly Trump. The two beady lumps of coal for eyes, the golf ball chin shadow, the dried angel hair pasta ’do – Ms. Boardman captured the essence of DJT.
If anything, she normalized Agent Orange. His skin looks human. There are no white circles around the eyes from the goggles he wears in his tanning crypt. His lips are not pursed in spittle-rage formation. His nose is kind of cute.
I get that Trump is not an art connoisseur any more than he’s a biochemist. But if he really wants to behold an “unflattering” painting, he should check out the one George W. Bush did of Vladimir Putin. Or the post-Coronation portrait of King Charles, in which the monarch looks like he was doused with buckets of pig blood while relegated to the Seventh Circle of Hell.
Trump should get one of his lackeys to Google a 2004 painting of the late Prince Philip. He is bare-chested with a blue bottle fly on his shoulder and a plant growing out of his index finger. His nose is big enough to cast a menacing shadow over Wembley Stadium.
There was the 2017 bust of Cristiano Ronaldo that was placed in Portugal’s Madeira Airport because flying isn’t stressful enough. The superstar athlete looked like he got blasted in the head with a 500-pound soccer ball that rearranged his jaw and left him cross-eyed.
Other artists, usually working in wax, have managed to turn Lil Wayne into a flying monkey, Kate Moss into a gold pretzel, Melania Trump into a piece of firewood and the Rock into an albino Mr. Clean. We can all sympathize.
It’s always jarring to be immortalized in an unflattering light. At a premiere party last year for “Gladiator II,” my wife and I sat for a caricature. She looked great, as she always does. I looked like my bloated corpse had been pulled from a muddy marsh two weeks after drowning.
As Trump wrote this week: “Nobody likes a bad picture or painting of themselves …”
For once, he’s right. But this tempest in a gilded frame gave me an idea.
You know how this lunatic is constantly running his yap about turning Canada into the 51st state? What if we weaponized his delusional vanity against him? What if PM Mark Carney commissioned Canadian artists to crank out a factory of hideous Trump paintings?
We could hang them in government buildings, in grocery stores, on the outside of mansions, in post offices, in hockey arenas and all points in between. Trump can’t demand we take them down as happened this week with the Colorado painting.
He has no art jurisdiction on this side of the border.
Canada would cease to be “part of the greatest land mass in history” and instead morph into a rude reminder that he does not resemble young Elvis.
We should flash holograms of a Trump minotaur with preemie hands on buildings. We should laminate doctored images of Trump – my God, he has no mouth! – on milk bags. DEI his face and turn him into Aunt Jemima. Make him bald. Give him rabies. Add a third eye to his forehead. Replace his ears with the Tesla logo. Supersize his gut to the third trimester.
What’s he going to do? Order his secretary of defence, Jack Daniels, to vaporize every ugly rendering? This is the most incompetent cabinet in American history. These geniuses didn’t realize they had invited Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, to join an emoji-filled group chat that detailed top secret plans for the attack on Houthis in Yemen.
Jack Daniels couldn’t find Manitoba on a map let alone the back-alley co-ordinates of a ghastly painting that depicts his boss in the form of a churlish beaver.
Donald Trump hates his Colorado portrait? Canada should make thousands more.
Let’s turn our country into one big gallery of mocking effigies.
